An animal-welfare organization reflects on its nerve-wracking rescue – and what it might mean for troubled zoos around the world.
When a rescue team arrived to evacuate a closing zoo near the Gaza Strip city of Khan Younis in late August, just 15 animals remained.
They included Laziz, a nine-year-old Bengal tiger that is—according to Four Paws, the Vienna-based animal-welfare nonprofit that led the rescue—the last tiger in Gaza. There were also five monkeys, an emu, a pelican, two buzzards, two porcupines, two tortoises, and a doe. The doe had lost her fawn to wounds shortly before the rescuers arrived.
Opened in 2007 on three and a half acres of land next to an amusement park, the Khan Younis Zoo has been called “the world’s worst zoo” by Four Paws and international media outlets. Hundreds of animals here starved to death during a seven-week war between Israel and Hamas in 2014. And last year, the surviving animals began sharing their cramped cages with the dead: Over 50 dead animals—including Laziz’s mate—were taxidermied by the zoo staff.
Abu Diab Oweida, the Palestinian businessman who owned the zoo, said that the mummifications were politically motivated—done “to prove to the whole world that even animals have been affected and [killed] by the Israeli occupation after the three [recent] wars in the Gaza Strip.”
Read the article in National Geographic.